I am listening to the Heartless Bastards live at SXSW (podcast on NPR - thanks!), and it's like if Martha Wainwright sang for the Replacements on an alternate-universe 'Reality Bites' soundtrack. Maybe some geneticist will combine her genes with Robert Plant's and build a clone army of bad-ass wailers wielding beat-up guitars and cussing in regional dialects. Take that, alien overlords!

Period.

One of the most beautiful things that civilization has bequeathed to us is the periodic table. It's amazing because it always existed - at least, for millions upon millions of years - but was only written down a couple of hundred years ago. Like some of the so-called "man-made" elements in the higher-numbered periods, it just took some human hands to reassemble it. Human tools, not human minds. Even the most brilliant chemists and astrophysicists had to follow the rules that the Universe invented; they don't create or conceive or even mold this masterpiece; they just put the pieces in the order most resembling what the Universe would impart if it spoke English. But the Universe doesn't speak English. It speaks mathematics. And light. And particles, and wavelengths, and electrons.  The elements were always there, not concerned with their own size or shape or whether or not we used used the Latin root word. They shall continue to be just themselves, reacting, reassembling, long after Homo sapiens sapiens stop talking about them.

This commonplace black-and-white fixture in classrooms the world over is the whole of nature translated into human language. And it looks so boring. But it contains our known universe.

local exports

The British man was hoping to break into the film business. He knew it was a cliche, he said, sheepish, but he had had meetings, and had another scheduled for the next day. He was making contacts. 

His seat-mate, a middle-aged brunette whose words rushed out of her mouth before her thoughts could catch up, was only too happy to talk about movie stars and directors and their latest flashy projects. She helped him build upon the stereotype that all Angelenos read Variety. 

He really likes Stanley Kubrick. And the weather here is fantastic. She agrees, excitedly, because, well, no one ever talks about the weather.

The automated voice told us unhurriedly that the next stop was 'Comp-ton Sta-tion', prompting the British man to ask his new friend about Compton's exports to the world at large.

"I listen to the rap songs," he clipped, "and they mention Compton quite a bit. Also Long Beach, South Central...I can't remember the others..."

She wants to talk about movies. And the weather.

"So what studios have you been to? How did the meetings -oh, call it a pitch" (giggle) "go? Who'd you talk to? So you live in London?" Her sentences pile on top of each other. 

London is the only city in England, so you just might as well say you live there, I want to tell the British man. I want to tell the British man that Compton isn't scary. It has little houses with nice people, who put bars on their windows some time ago. It has new multicolored (unsold) condominiums, that look like crap, like they'll fall over if you hammer a nail into the wall to hang a picture. It has a few dirty streets, while some aren't so bad. An abandoned armchair, where someone is lucky enough to sleep, sometimes. It has a city hall, chamber of commerce, old folks' home, gardens. It is home to whole families and fractured families, trash-strewn yards with chain-link fences and small patches of well-kept green lawn. Pigeons, cats, dogs, goldfish, books, guns, grammas, pregnancies, language, assumptions. What it lacks in confidence it makes up in reputation.